Review of Whatever You Do, Just Don’t, by Matthew Stewart, pub. Happenstance 2023

[sheenaghpugh]

This is a collection by what you might call a doubly displaced poet: brought up in England, he moves to Spain and experiences being seen as a foreigner there, but when, many years later, he returns to the scenes of his youth (as the Welsh poet JT Jones put it, “to walk in the places where I used to run”), both he and they have changed enough to make him, again, a “foreigner”.

The collection is thoughtfully structured to reflect this narrative; in the first section “Britanico”, we can sense the strangeness of a new climate in “Calor”:

   This isn’t heat. This is Calor,
   silting and clogging up the air

and the effect of different history and memories in “Translator, Traitor”:

    The War was 39 to 45,
    suffering for the sake of a cause—
    common enemies, common memories.

   La Guerra, 36 to 39,
  was brother killing brother, scores settled
  with the neighbours, decades of reprisals.

He is good at focusing on the small details that constitute identity – forgetting which side of the road to drive on, having trouble with the Spanish rhotic “r” – the poem “Rolling my ‘r’s” echoes in reverse the Proclaimers’ anthem about how they could never “throw the R away”. I did think his reaction to surrendering his UK driving licence a bit overdone:

     my balance
    tilted and swayed— I had to make a grab
    for the counter. (“Carnet de Conducir”)

But then I’ve never had a driving licence, so perhaps I underestimate the trauma involved…

There is a section dealing with “Family Matters”, principally memories of parents, in which there are some memorable images, like the paper clip around documents:

    How it brings their things together.
    How neatly, temporarily,
    it brings them together.

The section “Starting Eleven”, at first sight, is something of an outlier in the pattern, concerning as it does past players for Aldershot FC. But since most of them seem to have come from elsewhere and later moved on, they too can be seen as deracinated, only ever temporarily at home. I liked “Ian Phillips”:

   All he wants is to play one more season,
  one more season, his shoulder relishing
  the chance to usher dainty right-wingers
  straight into the advertising hoardings

The last section, “Retracing Steps”, is the mirror of the first: on a visit to England it is the poet’s wife (or possibly son), rather than he, who is the foreigner, and post-Brexit, this takes on a menacing tinge. Brexit and its aftermath do not crop up much in UK poetry, but then few UK poets have this perspective on it:

  Just don’t raise your voice if speaking
 Spanish while on a bus or train.

  Just don’t think anyone means you
 when they slag off the foreigners.

  Just take no notice of the flags
  in every town. (“Warning”)

The poet himself, though screened by the English accent he has never lost, is conscious that he is no longer quite the same person who left:

  But there’s a lift of my eyebrow,
 rise in my tone at the end
 of words. My dancing hands.

  I wear these clues, can’t take them off
 like some disguise. I’m different.
 Are you afraid of me?

I was reminded of Confucius’s observation: “Men’s natures are alike; it is their habits that drive them far apart”.

But the most powerful poem in this section, and perhaps in the whole collection, for me was “Aveley Lane”, heavy with the transience of human existence wherever it is, “temporarily”, lived:

   Here’s another mother getting supper
  in Neil’s kitchen. Here’s another father
  parking his car in Adrian’s driveway.
  They go about their family routines
  as if they’ll never be replaced.

This is an unusual collection, from a viewpoint we do not often see, and correspondingly enlightening.